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Marco didn’t move for over an hour.  Throughout his surveillance, he kept a portion of his vision on the light that would indicate a restored connection—however fleeting—to Priyanka.  Of course it never lit.

When he finally dared leave his hiding spot, he opted to try to return to the vent.  His hook caught on the fourth toss, and while in actuality his ascent probably took no more than fifteen seconds, it seemed an eternity to Marco.

He had only the roughest approximation of the direction of the building’s “front,” but Marco wanted out as soon as possible.  Even if he had located the room containing the captives, the only true aid he could effect would first require contact with Priyanka.

After much exploration, he found what appeared to be the front lobby.  It looked like a boutique art gallery, but Marco guessed that savvy clients probably gave a passphrase and were admitted to a “private show room” where they waited, enjoyed refreshments, and made their selections.  No hostess was present.

An array of display shelves lined the wall beneath the vent, and it was fairly easy for Marco to drop from one to the next with minimal exposure.  He had reached a shelf four feet above the floor when the door to the street opened.

The gallery was entered by a blonde woman wearing a very stylish red dress and complementary hat.  She paused at the entrance, then slowly started browsing the shelves.

Marco had frozen behind a porcelain urn, but once he peeked his head out, he knew he had seen this woman before.  It wasn’t the vague celebrity of Senator Bachmann; it was more immediate.  Then it hit him:  the hat!

The woman who was being restored the day he left the warren was now standing five feet away, twenty-four times the height she was just two days ago.

Marco ran to the corner of the shelf and began waving his arms and yelling.  “Hey!  Ma’am!  Hey!  Down here!”

At first he thought she was going to look at the other side of the gallery, but then her gaze lit on him.  She bent forward and her eyes widened.  Marco gestured frantically for her to come closer.  She gently picked him up and brought him to her face.

“It’s you!” she thundered in his ears.  “From the warren!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he shouted.  “We have to get out of here now!  I’m a policeman from the warren investigating some missing persons, and they’re trafficking in jaked sex slaves here!  I need to contact my partner in the Federal Cohort.  I can’t get her signal here...”

Marco’s voice trailed off as the woman’s expression evolved from shock to scrutiny to satisfied smirk.  He paused, then signed his own death warrant.

“Your name wouldn’t happen to be Nicole Blythe, would it?” he shouted.

She raised her eyebrows and smiled.  “Very good, Detective,” she said, carrying him into the private show room.

 


 

Blythe made her way to her office, smaller but more luxuriously furnished than Zhou’s.  She set Marco on the desk blotter, then covered him with an inverted coffee mug.

When at last she lifted the mug away, she had hung her hat on a nearby rack and brought out a large white mixing bowl.  She unceremonially transferred Marco to the hollow of the bowl, which looked as if it had recently contained a large caesar salad.

Blythe loomed over the three-inch-tall man.  “Tell me, Detective, who else knows you’re here?”

“I don’t even know where I am,” he shouted.  He couldn’t see anything beyond the rim of the bowl other than the giantess’s sneering face.

“Hamilton told me about the Federal bitch,” she said.  “He didn’t say anything about using vermin as spies.”

Marco didn’t say anything, but she saw his reaction to Chadwell’s name.

“Ah, so you hid out in his office, and she didn’t tell her boss at the Cohort.  Big no-no.  That’s it for her, then.”

Marco couldn’t stop himself.  “She’ll beat any court of inquiry,” he shouted.

“Not if Hamilton buys the judges, which he already has.”

Marco couldn’t meet her smug gaze.

“How did you get here, I wonder?” she mused.  “Hitched a ride with Veronica, I suppose.”

Marco knew he was a dead man, but he was wearing a wire and Blythe was monologuing like a Bond villain.  Perhaps someday someone might recover his rig and learn the truth.

“Why can’t I get a signal?” he shouted.

“Still trying to call your Federal floozy?  Never gonna work.  Hamilton has friends at the NSA, and this whole neighborhood is in the middle of one of their dead zones.  This,” she snagged his ankle transponder with a pair of wire cutters, “is useless now.”  She snipped it off, flipping him on his back.

He jumped back to his feet.  “How did you get the people out of the warren?”

“They deserved what they got, they were so stupid.  We told them they were getting vaccinated, the injection knocked them out, and we rolled them out the vent, where Hamilton’s muscleman bagged them.”

“What happened to Payne?” he shouted.

“Little Benny?” she said in a childlike voice.  “Benny got greedy, demanded to be restored.  He forgot his place.  We promised to restore him, and the idiot believed us.  He went through the vent on his own.”

“Did Chadwell have him killed?”

“Hamilton held onto Benny until I could get out,” she said, twirling a fork.

“And?”

“And I crunched his skull beneath my molars and shat out the splinters of his bones!” she cackled, pointing the fork at Marco.

“That sounds painful,” he shouted, dodging the tines.

“Oh, I think I’m big enough to handle it,” she said, reaching for him.

A sharp bang erupted behind Blythe, who snapped around.  Then a three-second crackle, and Blythe spasmed and fell out of her chair.

A Federal Cohort officer in full ballistic gear and respiratory mask lumbered into Marco’s view.  The officer bent down to examine Marco, then stood up, holstered her taser, and removed her gloves, helmet, and mask.

Even at this close range, Marco’s phone still couldn’t reach Priyanka’s earpiece through the NSA jamming.  He raised his arms, and she duly plucked him from the salad bowl and brought him close enough to hear.

“I might be mistaken, Centurion,” he shouted, “but I don’t believe you afforded that suspect adequate opportunity to surrender before you employed force.”

“I beg your pardon, Detective,” said Priyanka.  “It appeared to me that she was about to eat the last piroshky, which as you know I cannot resist.”

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